Categorie: Wants

Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates raised alarm Thursday after the Trump administration called on Congress to reauthorize an NSA mass surveillance program that was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The New York Times, which obtained the Trump administration’s request to Congress, reported that “the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans’ domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act.”

“The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but the Trump administration wants it made permanent,” according to the Times.

The administration claimed in its letter to Congress—which was signed by outgoing National Intelligence chief Dan Coats—that the NSA has suspended the spying program, but Free Press Action government relations director Sandra Fulton said in a statement that this “should give little comfort to those whose privacy rights are routinely violated by authorities.”

“The White House is calling for reauthorization of a program that security agencies have used to spy on innocent people, violate their privacy, and chill free speech,” said Fulton. “The NSA program permits the mapping of relationships among members of marginalized communities and distant associates of targeted individuals, even when most individuals in those communities were never suspected of wrongdoing.”

“Historically, authorities have used such overbroad authority to harass members of these communities,” Fulton added, “especially those who speak out when their rights are under threat.”

Patrick Toomey, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s National Security Project, urged Congress to ignore the Trump administration’s request and let the surveillance program die.

“It’s long past time that this surveillance program was shuttered once and for all,” Toomey told the Times. “The NSA has been vacuuming up hundreds of millions of Americans’ call records as part of a program that is hopelessly complex and lacks any discernible evidence of its value. We should not leave such a sweeping, unaccountable power in the hands of our spy agencies.”

For 8 years, the Voltaire Network has been unable to open a bank account in a Western country. Whatever the location, after having received a primary agreement, we were informed that our account had been refused by the Central Bank of the country concerned, but without any reason being given. Everything transpires as if there existed a confidential international black list shared by the Central Banks.

Today we are obliged to reimburse the money invested for the hosting and maintenance of the site over the last few years – a total of 48,000 Euros.

A collection box system – the Internet site Leetchi – was created in France by a branch of the Crédit Mutuel Arkéa for the collection of donations. In last June, this site was blocked by the Justice Department after it had acted to close down a collection on behalf of the boxer Christophe Dettinger, accusing him of wanting to avoid paying his legal expenses, but to put money aside in order to pay any eventual fines, which is illegal. Mr.Dettinger was charged with having bare-knuckled some gendarmes (in riot gear) who were manhandling a woman during a Yellow Vests demonstration.

Then came the sudden appearance of second collection box system, Le Pot Commun. It is in all points absolutely identical to the first. Its Internet site is the copy and paste of Leetchi, which leads us to believe that it is run by the same company. Two weeks ago, we contacted them to organise a collection. They accepted our request as well as the administrative credentials we had sent them. However, when we gave them the order to transfer the money already collected to a designated bank account which had been opened for the occasion, they no longer replied. On 25 July, they wrote that the order had been recorded, but not executed. We wrote to them several times. They did not answer. Suddenly, on 1 August, they closed our collection and sent a message to all our donors announcing they would reimburse them, allegedly « at their demand ».

To sum up: We still have to reimburse 48,000 Euros, and we don’t have a penny. Your money did not reach us. Le Pot Commun has refused to honour the contract – not because of the suspicion of a possible infraction,

Facebook is one step closer to reading your mind. The social media giant has become one step closer to developing a working brain-computer interface, capable of reading users’ thoughts.

CNBCreported that Facebook has taken yet another step in developing its brain-computer interface, with the company’s Reality Labs division working alongside researchers from the University of California, San Francisco to develop a device that can decode speech directly from the human brain onto a screen. A new report published in the journalNature Communications reveals that researchers are becoming closer than ever to connecting human brains directly to computers.

Researchers reportedly worked with three patients currently undergoing treatment for epilepsy in order to develop the device. The patients had electrodes implanted into their brains and researchers will spend the next year testing the technology. Researchers from UCSF stated that the findings of the research could help to give patients that are unable to speak due to severe brain injuries a new way to communicate. –Breitbart News

Researchers have claimed that successful trials are more likely to be used as part of Facebook’s efforts to develop augmented reality glasses.

Today we’re sharing an update on our work to build a non-invasive wearable device that lets people type just by imagining what they want to say. Our progress shows real potential in how future inputs and interactions with AR glasses could one day look. https://t.co/ilk192GwAR

Musk claimed at a recent event that the company expects to start human trials before the end of 2020. Facebook is quickly jumping into artificial intelligence and mind reading at a time when humanity is quickly approaching “singularity.” or the point of no return when it comes to machine learning.

The Pentagon is desperate. Far too many millennials are criminals, so luring them in to become the latest crop of bullet stoppers for the state is a nonstarter.

Solution? Recruit 16-year-olds. Most have yet graduated to petty and violent crime, although a lot of them are in video game training for a future of violence and self-destructive stupidity.

It’s not being widely reported in the media. Recruiters are ready to go after tenth-graders. They are itching to snag kids before they engage in a life of crime, or before they have fully-mature brains (well, some of them) and decide to kill and be killed isn’t much of a career choice.

First, though, the state will have to give these little darlings the “right” to vote for a crop of handpicked carnival barkers, euphemistically called representatives of the people.

I don’t know about you, but when I was sixteen all I thought about was cruising in my father’s car with a freshly minted state permission to drive card in my wallet as I searched desperately for girls willing to make-out in the backseat.

It took a year or two before I was politically aware, mostly as a result of Richard Nixon’s plan to “draft” me (polite speak for slavery) into the meat grinder he inherited from LBJ, aka the Vietnam War, where I would either be minced, traumatized for life, or lucky enough to stay behind lines and scrub latrines while other kids fought and senselessly died.

Around this time college, high school students, and millions of other concerned Americans marched against the war, a truly remarkable one-time event now impossible in America because the military is “volunteer” and our wars are “humanitarian.”

Most of these so-called volunteers “joined” the military because they have so few other career options (if you consider killing other people a career choice). Brought up in largely single-parent homes and taught all manner of nonsense in public schools that now resemble locked down prisons,

The US is involved in regime change worldwide – from Venezuela in South America, to Ukraine in Eastern Europe, to Syria in the Middle East, to Afghanistan in Central Asia.

But these headline-grabbing wars, coups, color revolutions, and interventions are far from the full extend of US interference.

The US is also engaged in regime change efforts all along China’s peripheries. This includes across Southeast Asia and in particular, the nation of Thailand.

Hard Times for US Proxies

Recent elections held earlier this year validated public support for a 2014 coup ousting US-backed proxy Thaksin Shinwatra, his sister Yingluck Shinawatra, and their Pheu Thai political party (PTP).

The military-linked Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP) won the popular vote and built a coalition with a majority in parliament. PPRP’s head, Prayuth Chan-O-Cha easily won a parliamentary vote for Thailand’s next prime minister.

Part of Shinawatra’s strategy during the last election was dividing his political party into multiple parties so that if one or two were disbanded, there would still be several others left to run for seats in parliament.

One of these parties is Future Forward (FFP) led by billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. His party’s founding members include leaders and activists drawn from US and European-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

FFP faired poorly in the elections coming in distant third with several million fewer votes than PPRP. Despite coming in third, and despite Thanathorn claiming he was not Shinawatra’s proxy – Thaksin Shinawatra’s PTP nominated him as their candidate for prime minister, but fell far short of winning.

Panhandling Overseas for Support

Thanathorn now has criminal cases mounting against him owed to serial violations of election laws as well as charges related to sedition. Perhaps in hopes of being overseas if a guilty verdict is reached and escaping jail – Thanathorn now finds himself “touring” the US and Europe asking – and receiving – support in Washington,

Thanks to a disillusioned CIA case officer’s actions in 1975, there are currently a few limits to what can or can’t be reported about covert operatives working overseas.

In 1975, Philip Agee published a memoir about his years with the CIA. Attached to his memoir — which detailed his growing discontentment with the CIA’s clandestine support of overseas dictators — was a list of 250 CIA agents or informants. In response to this disclosure, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), which criminalized disclosing the identity of covert intelligence agents.

The IIPA did what it could to protect journalists by limiting the definition of “covert agent” to agents serving overseas and then only those who were currently working overseas when the disclosure occurred. It also required the government to show proof the person making the disclosure was “engaged in a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose” covert agents. The law was amended in 1999 to expand the coverage to include covert agents working overseas within five years of the disclosure. –Tech Dirt

Last year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that it was seeking noninvasive ways “to achieve high levels of brain-system communications without surgery.” The techniques would “allow precise, high-quality connections to specific neurons or groups of neurons.”

The agency wants to create mind-controlled weapons of war, as it (vaguely) explained in two recent press releases.

According to a press release published on May 20, 2019, the agency has awarded funding to six companies to support N3:

Battelle Memorial Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Rice University, and Teledyne Scientific are leading multidisciplinary teams to develop high-resolution, bidirectional brain-machine interfaces for use by able-bodied service members. These wearable interfaces could ultimately enable diverse national security applications such as control of active cyber defense systems and swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles, or teaming with computer systems to multitask during complex missions. (source)

When the four-year program was announced last year, in a press release DARPA began by mentioning all of the positive things that brain-machine interfaces are being used for:

Over the past two decades, the international biomedical research community has demonstrated increasingly sophisticated ways to allow a person’s brain to communicate with a device, allowing breakthroughs aimed at improving quality of life, such as access to computers and the internet, and more recently control of a prosthetic limb. DARPA has been at the forefront of this research.

The state of the art in brain-system communications has employed invasive techniques that allow precise, high-quality connections to specific neurons or groups of neurons. These techniques have helped patients with brain injury and other illnesses. (source)

Sounds noble enough…until you get to the next line.

However, these techniques are not appropriate for able-bodied people. DARPA now seeks to achieve high levels of brain-system communications without surgery, in its new program,

No more than a couple of months ago the US Congress would discuss the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. Yet, in spite of an extensive amount of effort invested by the international community into the resolution of the Afghan war, the conflict stretching for now over 18 years just will not end, while the absence of any visible progress on the path toward reconciliation remains a major geopolitical concern for a many international players.

It’s true that the former US ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, after being appointed US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation held a series of meetings with representatives of the Taliban movement but none reaped any visible results. Experts believe that new rounds of negotiations are being protracted because of Washington’s stubborn unwillingness to accept certain conditions put forward by the Taliban, the principal of which is the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban seems to be willing to create an interim government in Afghanistan, but both the US and the sitting Afghan authorities oppose this proposition.

In early May, the sixth round of talks between representatives of the United States and the Taliban movement took place in Qatar. However, from the very first days it became clear that there was no hope that parties could achieve any progress in the foreseeable future. Throughout all of the rounds the United States has been persistently trying to get a seat for the representatives of the Kabul government at the negotiation table with the Taliban, while insisting that the Pentagon is entitled to keep a number of military bases within the territory of Afghanistan. It goes without saying that the Taliban would find both of these propositions unacceptable.

It’s hardly a secret that the Taliban refused to recognize the government of Afghanistan’s President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, while describing it as a puppet government. Washington’s emissaries persist in stating that the US must keep at least 700 servicemen deployed in Afghanistan under the pretext of protecting the US diplomatic mission in Afghanistan. The lasting presence of the US military, occupying Afghanistan for almost two decades in the territory of this sovereign state, is not something that the Taliban can even consider agreeing to too, so it’s adamant that all US troops must go.

The US Navy is seeking to create an archive that will store no less than 350 billion social media posts, as part of the military branch’s “research efforts” into “modes of collective expression.”

The Department of the Navy has posted a solicitation asking contractors to bid on a project that would amass a staggering 350 billion social media posts dating from 2014 through 2016. The data will be taken from a single social media platform – but the solicitation does not specify which one.

“We seek to acquire a large-scale global historical archive of social media data, providing the full text of all public social media posts, across all countries and languages covered by the social media platform,” the contract synopsis reads. The Navy said that the archive would be used in “ongoing research efforts” into “the evolution of linguistic communities” and “emerging modes of collective expression, over time and across countries.”

The archive will draw from publicly available social media posts and “no private communications or private user data” will be included in the database. However, all records must include the time and date at which each message was sent and the public user handle associated with the message. Additionally, each record in the archive must include all publicly available meta-data, including country, language, hashtags, location, handle, timestamp, and URLs, that were associated with the original posting.

The data must be collected from at least 200 million unique users in at least 100 countries, with no single country accounting for more than 30 percent of users, the advert says.

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Massive Instagram data dump by Indian firm exposed records of millions of influencers – report

While the stated intentions of the project may sound benign, the US government has previously expressed interest in collecting social media data for more eyebrow-raising purposes. Last year, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a notice asking contractors to bid on a database that tracks 290,000 global news sources in over 100 languages.

President Donald Trump has warned Tehran that it would be “the official end” of the Islamic Republic if it threatens the US, just as Washington builds up its military presence near Iran under the pretext of national security.

It’s unclear what triggered the US leader this time around, as Iranian officials have consistently said in recent days that they want to avoid a military confrontation with the US. Earlier on Sunday, the commander of the elite Revolutionary Guards, Major General Hossein Salami, insisted that Iran only wants peace, but isn’t afraid to fight America.

If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!

Earlier, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also said there will be no war in the Persian Gulf. However, he added that Tehran won’t be involved in talks on a new nuclear deal with the US.

The Trump administration has recently been increasing pressure on Iran with sanctions and a military buildup near its territorial waters. The US and its allies began enhanced maritime security patrols in the international waters of the Persian Gulf this week after Washington beefed up its Fifth fleet.

A USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group was deployed to the Persian Gulf and B-52 bombers were sent on patrol in the area in a move to send a message to Tehran.

Tensions in the region escalated after the US started building up its military presence, citing “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” coming from the Iranian side. It has not yet been revealed what led to the escalation, with various media reports suggesting versions from misunderstanding to Israeli influence.

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‘There will be no war in Gulf region,’ despite wishes of Trump’s ‘B Team’ – Iran’s Zarif

Germany’s armed forces are currently studying the possibility of acquiring nuclear bombers capable of using the new American B61-12atomic bombs.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon itself plans to deploy these new atomic bombs in the German region of Eifel, in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The German air force already has multi-tasking Tornado warplanes, which are already capable of deploying American atomic bombs. But those aircraft are going to be replaced, possibly, by European-developed Eurofighters, or by United States manufactured F/A-18 Super Hornets.

Either way, the warplane that Germany selects will have to be equipped with the AMAC (Aircraft Monitoring and Control) system, which allows the use of the new American atomic bombs and enables the regulation of the power of the explosion as well as at what height the bombs explode after they are launched.

Germany does not manufacture atomic weapons but has come to consider itself as a nuclear power because it has vectors to use them, and believes that this gives it the right to sit on the UN Security Council sharing the permanent member position occupied by France. Both countries would thus represent the European Union, under the auspices of NATO.

Venezuela has moved eight tons of gold from the central bank in an attempt to raise hard currency to help its cash-strapped economy hit by crippling US sanctions, according to government sources cited by Reuters.

There have been unconfirmed reports that the Venezuelan government has removed around 30 tons of gold from central bank vaults this year. Washington and the government’s opposition have accused Caracas of trying to sell national gold reserves abroad. The US has threatened sanctions against any company attempting to buy Venezuelan gold.

Read more

Speculation over Caracas trying to sell the gold comes amid the latest round of US sanctions that have severely hit Venezuela’s oil sector – a key source of the country’s income. Venezuela’s substantial gold holdings have become one of the few sources of hard currency, which is crucial for imports with the country’s crude sales severely restricted by Washington.

The current reserves of physical gold kept in the vaults of the Venezuelan central bank are estimated at 100 tons, worth over $4 billion, according to an unnamed government source, as cited by the news agency. The source expects the central bank’s reserves to be nearly depleted by the end of the year if Caracas continues at this pace.

Venezuela’s economic crisis – with six years of a steep recession, hyperinflation, and massive shortages of basic goods – intensified after the country was thrown into political turmoil. In January, Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido proclaimed himself ‘interim president’, with the US and 53 nations recognizing him as head of state.

With Washington’s support, the opposition headed by Guaido is trying to force the resignation of Venezuela’s elected president, Nicolas Maduro. They are also trying to freeze the country’s assets held abroad, including $1.3 billion worth of gold stored in the Bank of England.

“As more and more data flows from your body and brain to the smart machines via the biometric sensors, it will become easy for corporations and government agencies to know you, manipulate you, and make decisions on your behalf. Even more importantly, they could decipher the deep mechanisms of all bodies and brains, and thereby gain the power to engineer life. If we want to prevent a small elite from monopolising such godlike powers, and if we want to prevent humankind from splitting into biological castes, the key question is: who owns the data? Does the data about my DNA, my brain and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?”―Professor Yuval Noah Harari

Uncle Sam wants you.

Correction: Uncle Sam wants your DNA.

Actually, if the government gets its hands on your DNA, they as good as have you in their clutches.

We are off to a huge news cycle for 2019, with everything from shifting sands in the Mideast, to what some say could be a growing class rebellion in the EU, which might tip its house of cards over.

The Trump White House interprets its Syria policy differently day after day. More countries state their intentions to resume ties with Syria, including many in Europe. And the same EU has left Iran standing at the altar over its phantom Special Purpose Vehicle that Mogherini said would be ready by year end, but which appears to have morphed into a “dark project”.

Lost among all the current high profile stories was a Pentagon report that slipped by getting much news coverage, but continues the US long march from a new Cold War to a hot one. The US Defense Science Board issued a report titled Task Force on Survivable Logistics. Although it has a somewhat innocuous title, it is a message in a bottle to us all.

In short, the report was a maximum effort to sell a US military logistics crisis to fight a World War with a “strategic adversary”. And “crisis” was used in describing the situation, indicating that the US has allowed the military logistics supply chain to deteriorate badly, due to funding going into other things.

But there was no mention in the report of our fighting new fake wars after blowing trillions in failed and dead-end US military adventures in the Mideast that have left a wide path of destruction in their wake; and all this was done when no real war had been declared.

Wading through the report, I got the feeling that, after Trump had rolled out his nuclear modernization program with its big price tag and bragged he was going to build the biggest and best military machine on the planet, these logistics chiefs wanted to get in on the action. Dear Mr. President, when we outspend everyone else put together, just who did you have in mind to use this big bad machine on?

And as to the drafters of the report, I would ask them, if we do have crises logistics problems when we have over 700 bases worldwide, with members of NATO creeping up to the Russian and Chinese borders to be able to threaten them with a quick delivery first strike,

The government of India wants tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Google to remove content it deems “unlawful” within 24 hours of official notice, and develop “automated tools” which would “proactively identify and remove such material,” reports BuzzFeed, citing the publication of the proposed rules by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

The rules would also require companies to break end-to-end encryption to allow the government to snoop on communications.

India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) published the proposed rules on its website following a report on Monday by the Indian Express revealing the government’s proposal to modify the country’s primary IT law to work them in. The report comes days after India’s government seemingly authorized 10 federal agencies to snoop into every computer in the country last week.

The proposed measures have provoked concerns from privacy activists who say they would threaten free speech and enable mass surveillance. –BuzzFeed

Under the new rules, any platform with over 5 million users in India would be required to appoint a “person of contact” to provide “24×7 coordination with law enforcement agencies and officers,” while also maintaining records of “unlawful activity” for a period of six months – or indefinitely if ordered by a court. Each user would also be sent monthly notifications notifying them that the platform can and may “remove non-compliant information immediately and kick the user off.”

A MeitY official discussed modifying India’s IT law to work in the new rules with representatives from at least seven tech companies including Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter in a confidential meeting last week, reported the Indian Express.

If the proposals were to go ahead, it “would be a tremendous expansion in the power of the government over ordinary citizens, eerily reminiscent of China’s blocking and breaking of user encryption to surveil its citizens,” the Internet Freedom Foundation,

The U.S. Navy wants to develop drones that are powered by harvesting “battlefield energy.”

Which is a more charitable way of describing a drone that flies by stealing electricity from power lines.

The problem is that future conflicts are likely to feature clouds of small drones, whether operating in swarms to overwhelm an enemy, or a mini-drone carried in a soldier’s pocket that flies ahead to scout out a building. But tiny drones have tiny batteries measured in thirty minutes or so of flight, and the battlefield is not the place to search for an electrical outlet to recharge.

“The infrastructure to manage a future fleet of sUAS [small UAVs] in the field under austere conditions may be daunting considering the magnitude of battery recharging needs,” the navy notes. “It is also desirable to simultaneously increase mission duration and persistence; therefore, the ability to scavenge power directly from the battlefield would be an important military technology with other dual-use civilian applications.”

But what if the fighting is in a city, where there will likely be plenty of electrical poles and power lines?

This would allow a drone “to ‘dock’ on a power line in an urban environment, scavenging magnetic energy as a means to trickle-charge its onboard batteries prior to mission continuation, could provide significant tactical benefits,” according to the navy research solicitation , which is looking for answers from industry and academia. “If the energy scavenging source is collocated at the mission area, full mission persistence might be achieved and the micro- and small UAS may never need to return to base.”

Remarkable is the amount of energy that’s floating around a battlefield. “The types of energy harvesting that fall into this category are broad, and include vibrational energy, simple mechanical energy, and electromagnetic energy,” says the navy. “Sources of electromagnetic energy that is abundant and available for harvesting and conversion include high-voltage substations, transformers, and alternating current transmission line (i.e., power lines).”

High-voltage substations on the power grid generate AC electric field strengths that are “comparable to solar panels operating on a cloudy day.” As if that wasn’t tempting enough for drone designers fretting over how maximize the juice that keeps their progeny flying, the navy also suggests that wireless sensors could be placed around these power nodes to also siphon off energy to keep their batteries topped off.

The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and International Affairs and Security Analyst via Moscow, Mark Sleboda take a look at Mike Pompeo’s shocking Brussels speech, where the U.S. Secretary of State took aim at the European Union and United Nations, citing such institutions as outdated and poorly managed, in need of a new dogma that places America at its epicenter.

Speaking in Brussels, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unwittingly underscored why nobody takes the United States seriously on the international stage. Via The Council on Foreign Relations…

In a disingenuous speech at the German Marshall Fund, Pompeo depicted the transactional and hypernationalist Trump administration as “rallying the noble nations of the world to build a new liberal order.” He did so while launching gratuitous attacks on the European Union, United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—pillars of the existing postwar order the United States did so much to create. He remained silent, naturally, on the body blows that the current administration has delivered to its erstwhile allies and partners, and to the institutions that once upon a time permitted the United States to legitimate rather than squander its international leadership.

In Pompeo’s telling, Donald J. Trump is simply seeking a return to the world that former Secretary of State George Marshall helped to create. In the decades after 1945, the United States “underwrote new institutions” and “entered into treaties to codify Western values of freedom and human rights.” So doing, the United States “won the Cold War” and—thanks to the late President George H. W. Bush, “we won the peace” that followed. “This is the type of leadership that President Trump is boldly reasserting.”

That leadership is needed because the United States “allowed this liberal order to begin to corrode” once the bipolar conflict ended. “Multilateralism has too often become viewed as an end unto itself,” Pompeo explained. “The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done.” What is needed is a multilateralism that once again places the nation-state front and center.

We’ve discussed this on and off for several years now. Civil asset forfeiture is a legal process that allows the government to seize assets and cash from citizens without any due process or judicial oversight.

You don’t even have to be charged with a crime. You are assumed guilty unless you can somehow prove your innocence.

Of course, not everyone has this ability… if you aren’t local, state, or federal law enforcement, this is called stealing, and you go to prison.

But the government is actually a bigger problem than common thieves.

A 2015 report showed that law enforcement used civil asset forfeiture to steal more from US residents than every thief, robber, and burglar in America combined.

About $4.5 BILLION worth of cash, cars, homes, and other property is taken by civil asset forfeiture each year – hundreds of millions more than common criminals steal.

And it happens at every level. Your local cop can use civil asset forfeiture just like your state trooper. And then any one of the armed agents of the US government—from the FBI to the Fish and Wildlife Service—can rob you for whatever reason they want.

This travesty continues to grow because the cops who take your stuff get to keep it. Police departments and government agencies around the country depend on civil asset forfeiture to boost their budgets.

Cops will literally keep some of the cars they take as squad cars. And they make a fortune auctioning off the houses, boats, and anything else they confiscate.

Obviously this gives cops an incentive to steal, whether or not they actually think the property was used in a crime, or acquired illegally. Remember, civil asset forfeiture adds billions every year to their bottom line.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case of civil asset forfeiture.

Tyson Timbs was convicted of selling a small amount of drugs to an undercover police officer. He was sentenced to house arrest, and paid about $1,200 in fines.

But then police used civil asset forfeiture to take his $42,000 Land Rover which Timbs purchased with money from a life insurance policy after his father died.

I never cease to be amazed at the insouciance of Americans. Readers send me emails asking why I ever supported Trump when he was the Establishment’s candidate. If Trump was the Establishment’s candidate, why has the Establishment spent two years trying to destroy him?

The failure to put two and two together is extraordinary. Trump declared war on the Establishment throughout the presidential campaign and in his inaugural address.

As I wrote at the time, Trump vastly over-estimates the power of the president. He expected the Establishment, like his employees, to jump to his will, and he did not know Washington or who to appoint to support his goals. He has been totally defeated in his intention to normalize relations with Russia. Instead, we are faced with both Russia and China preparing for war.

In other words, the same outcome that Hillary would have achieved.

Trump has been so harassed by the Establishment that he is having trouble thinking straight. He was elected by “the deplorables” as the first non-Establishment candidate since when? You have to go back in history to find one. Perhaps Andrew Jackson. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were not the choice of the Democratic and Republican establishments, and the ruling establishments moved quickly to constrain both presidencies. The Democratic Establishment framed and removed both Carter’s budget director and chief of staff, depriving Carter of the kind of commitment he needed for his agenda. The Bush people that the Republican Establishment insisted be put in positions of power in the Reagan administration succeeded in blunting his reformist economic program and his determination to end the cold war. I fought both battles for Reagan, and I still have the bruises.

Trump is an outsider elected by “the deplorables” whose middle class jobs were offshored by America’s global corporations for the benefit only of the executives and large shareholders. A few people sold out the American middle class, which is shrinking away.

In the rest of the world, Trump’s true allies are the presidents of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, the former president of Ecuador, and the former president of Honduras, who was overthrown by “America’s First Black President,” the consequences of which are the caravan moving toward the US border.

“I will give the police carte blanche to kill.” “Let’s clog up the prisons with criminals.” “Police that kill thugs will be decorated.” These are all campaign trail statements from Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right Brazilian presidential candidate who will likely win second round elections on October 28. A cornerstone of his platform, his hard-line public security proposals include legalizing mass arrest warrants, permitting police to shoot without warning or prior engagement, building more prisons, allowing minors to be tried as adults, and easing restrictions on gun ownership for “good citizens.”

In an extremely violent, unequal, and racist society such as Brazil, where militarized policing of poor communities of mostly black and brown people is already the norm, it’s unsurprising that conservative, white elites would agree with these ideas. Bolsonaro’s support is strongest among men, whites, evangelicals, the wealthiest, and the most educated.

However, that’s not the whole story. In the most recent polling, 47 percent of self-defined black and brown voters support Bolsonaro. That’s 6 percentage points more than his opponent, the Workers’ Party’s Fernando Haddad, whose traditional base is among the poor. Bolsonaro has 38 percent support among voters who make minimum wage or less ($3,090 per year) and 48 percent among voters who make between $3,090 and $6,180. These numbers are consequential and, at first glance, perplexing: If police violence and abuse is endemic in Brazil, why would the principal victims of this problem support a candidate who wants those same police to be more violent and abusive? My field research as a social scientist offers some insight.

Maycon, 23, is a young black man from a poor neighborhood in Brazil. He has a brother in jail, dreams of being a police officer, and strongly defends implementing the death penalty, which he sees as the population’s defense against what he calls “homie rights,” a play on human rights. An ardent supporter of imprisoned ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, he would also like to see stricter laws for “bandits,” a central position of far-right candidates like Bolsonaro.

In the conversations I have had with teenagers from the poor outskirts of Brazil’s major cities, Bolsonaro voters follow the same punitive orientation and show solidarity with the police,

As the US continues to send not-so-subtle signals that it could be open to a military invasion of Venezuela after a US-supported coup plot involving Venezuelan military officers fizzled, Nicolas Maduro – who only a few months ago evaded a bizarre assassination attempt involving C4-laden drones – has accused the Trump Administration of conspiring to have him assassinated.

When approached for a response to Maduro’s comments, a White House spokesman did little to rebut his claims, saying only that the US’s “policy preference” is “for a peaceful, orderly return to democracy in Venezuela.” Given Venezuela’s ailing energy infrastructure, and US sanctions that have made it difficult for the Maduro regime to sell its oil or tap capital markets for funding, the government has been forced to rely on China and, to a lesser extent, Russia to keep it afloat.

But China’s latest money for oil deal hasn’t been enough to plug the gaping hole in the socialist country’s budget, and the country’s frenzied money printing has stoked expectations that the country’s inflation rate will surge to 1.37 million percent by the end of next year. Meanwhile, the IMF earlier this week reaffirmed its forecast that Venezuela’s GDP will shrink by 18% during 2018.

Nearly 2 million Venezuelans have fled since 2015 as the economic mismanagement under Maduro left the oil rich nation with crippling shortages of food and medicine. In response, Maduro has authorized violent crackdowns on street protests and dissent. Earlier this week, the US accused Maduro of ordering the death of a jailed opposition leader who died in police custody. They say he killed himself.

But in a televised broadcast, Maduro accused Colombia and the US of conspiring to kill him. The president has long claimed that he has been the target of an “economic war” orchestrated by Washington that has been the true cause of Venezuela’s societal collapse.

“They have given the order from the White House that Maduro be killed,” said Maduro, flanked by workers. He vowed that “they will not even touch a single hair of mine.”

As usual, Maduro didn’t provide any evidence to back up his claims. But in a country where even a cup of coffee is an unaffordable luxury,

Omnipresent facial recognition has become a golden goose for law enforcement agencies around the world. In the United States, few are as eager as the Department of Homeland Security. American airports are currently being used as laboratories for a new tool that would automatically scan your face — and confirm your identity with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — as you prepare to board a flight, despite the near-unanimous objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians, who call such scans invasive and pointless.

Although the new report, published by Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, is overwhelmingly supportive in its evaluation of airport-based biometric surveillance — the practice of a computer detecting your face and pairing it with everything else in the system — the agency notes some hurdles from a recent test code-named “Sprint 8.” Among them, the report notes with palpable frustration, was that airlines insist on letting their passengers depart on time, rather than subjecting them to a Homeland Security surveillance prototype plagued by technical issues and slowdowns:

Demanding flight departure schedules posed other operational problems that significantly hampered biometric matching of passengers during the pilot in 2017. Typically, when incoming flights arrived behind schedule, the time allotted for boarding departing flights was reduced. In these cases, CBP allowed airlines to bypass biometric processing in order to save time. As such, passengers could proceed with presenting their boarding passes to gate agents without being photographed and biometrically matched by CBP first. We observed this scenario at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport when an airline suspended the biometric matching process early to avoid a flight delay. This resulted in approximately 120 passengers boarding the flight without biometric confirmation.

“Repeatedly permitting airlines to revert to standard flight-boarding procedures without biometric processing may become a habit that is difficult to break.”

The report goes on to again bemoan “airlines’ recurring tendency to bypass the biometric matching process in favor of boarding flights for an on-time departure.” DHS, apparently, is worried that it could be habit-forming for the airlines: “Repeatedly permitting airlines to revert to standard flight-boarding procedures without biometric processing may become a habit that is difficult to break.”

There is a vast industry in the United States that wants a hot war with Syria and Iran as well as increased confrontation with Russia and China. It is appropriate to refer to it as an industry because it has many components and is largely driven by money, much of which itself comes from Wall Street and major corporations that profit from war related business.

Some prefer to refer to this monster as the Military Industrial Complex, but since that phrase was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961, it has grown enormously, developing a political dimension that includes a majority of congressmen who are addicted to receiving a tithe from the profits from the war economy to finance their own campaigns, permitting them to stay in office indefinitely and retire comfortably to a lobbying position or corporate directorship.

The defense industry also has spawned hundreds of so-called think-tanks whose sole business is promoting war. Some, like the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, have a clear agenda, but the most powerful rely on euphemisms to conceal what they are doing. They include the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, both of which promote a hard-line foreign policy directed against Iran and Russia, to include intensified confrontation with both in Syria.

The national media, which also benefits from the same food chain, is also complicit in the process, knowing that the public can easily be deceived by pronouncements coming from alleged experts in Washington. Leading politicians like Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain lead the pack but there is no shortage of lesser known congressmen to also raise the cry about foreign threats to national security. Regarding developments in Syria, Graham advised last weekend that Trump must attack and destroy the Syrian Air Force or “look weak” while McCain said White House talk of pulling troops out of the country had “emboldened” al-Assad.

Unenlightened self-interest prevails in the White House over the formulation of policy, with the public interest completely lost from sight as high officials jockey in support of the agendas being promoted by those with money and access to those in power. There is no other explanation for the astonishing performance last weekend, which pushed the United States closer to a new war in spite of Trump’s earlier expressed claims that he wants to exit from Syria,